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How much content before a web site is not considered thin?


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If you have articles on your web site, all of them are 1,000~3,000 words.

How many of such articles are required before the web site can be considered (not) thin?

 

Are forum threads/posts seen as equal content as articles by search engines?

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I dont know on your last question.. But I would say not being thin would be considered 100-200.. Big I would say 1000+, anything over 800ish shows dedication to me.. IT's all an opinion really.

 

Do you mean 100-200 1000-3000-word articles? I would say that's a very long way from being thin. In fact, I would consider such a site to be rather big. From my personal viewpoint, if you are talking about 1000-3000-word articles, anything above 10 articles shouldn't look thin anymore. A 1000-word article with images can easily cover 3-5 pages so, 10 such articles can cover 30-50 pages, which makes for quite a lot of content to read.

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I dont know on your last question.. But I would say not being thin would be considered 100-200.. Big I would say 1000+, anything over 800ish shows dedication to me.. IT's all an opinion really.

 

100~200 articles? That's a lot. Are we on the same page that each of these articles have a length of 1,000~3,000 words?

It is not easy to write that many articles by a single person even that person is knowledge enough to write that many. If outsource that many articles, it's going to cost a fortune.

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That may also depend on the niche. If you are targeting a medium sized niche then 50 articles would be enough to make a site look like an authority site. For a big niche, even 100 articles may not be enough to do the trick. Of course I am not considering article length here and I am not even sure how that affects the picture. I would suggest that you research your niche to find out how many articles the top sites in your niche have.

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  • 4 weeks later...

That may also depend on the niche. If you are targeting a medium sized niche then 50 articles would be enough to make a site look like an authority site. For a big niche, even 100 articles may not be enough to do the trick. Of course I am not considering article length here and I am not even sure how that affects the picture. I would suggest that you research your niche to find out how many articles the top sites in your niche have.

 

I guess it make sense that it is niche related. However, if one "size limited" niche can cover everything about it with lets say 20~30 articles, then after you have covered everything about it, there is nothing more to write. I know people say a web site need fresh content, and Google likes fresh content. Sites don't update often might drop in rank/SERP. So once the site is "completed" with its knowledge base, how would you deal with the (update) issue? Is it necessary to frequently update if you have already covered everything?

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Do you mean 100-200 1000-3000-word articles? I would say that's a very long way from being thin. In fact, I would consider such a site to be rather big. From my personal viewpoint, if you are talking about 1000-3000-word articles, anything above 10 articles shouldn't look thin anymore. A 1000-word article with images can easily cover 3-5 pages so, 10 such articles can cover 30-50 pages, which makes for quite a lot of content to read.

 

Agreed. I also don't recommend writing 3000 word articles in the first place even. Break those down into series instead. Even 1k can be too much as people's attention spans aren't that high usually. I tend to not aim for much higher than 500 words.

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Agreed. I also don't recommend writing 3000 word articles in the first place even. Break those down into series instead. Even 1k can be too much as people's attention spans aren't that high usually. I tend to not aim for much higher than 500 words.

 

I found it is very hard to cover complex topics with just 500 words. In fact I found it's hard to cover anything with less than 1,000 words if I want the article to be truly informative and won't leave the readers with lots of question marks after they have finished reading it.

 

I didn't even plan the article length before I wrote them. I just write everything I know about the topic and went through every popular questions related to the topic. In the end, I found the articles are always over 1,000, and could be as long as 3,000 words. Yes, I do realize it can make some impatient people feel "OMG so long" and they might leave lol. But people who are truly after good information shouldn't have a problem with that, and they are more likely to be the ones you can convert into customers.

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That's why I mentioned splitting it up. If it takes 3000 words to fully cover a topic, then awesome. But don't make it all in one article. Split it into three and link between each. You'll have more content and without overwhelming a reader.

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  • 4 months later...

I am not so sure that forum posts are really that far behind where search engine visibility is concerned. I still remember when I was first taking baby steps in cyber space. I was writing a few articles for my own blog. And I was also posting on a forum. Not exactly a big forum. In fact, it was one of those post to host forums. Yet the search engines picked up my forum posts as often as my blog posts for the same keywords.

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I find that something starts to happen within Google when you reach the 300 article mark, I've noticed this a few times now. If your pages are well interlinked it may be a result of your pages getting a good number of internal links to be deemed important? Only Google really knows, 500 words and 300 pages seems to be a minimum for me before Google finally sends more than the typical 100 visitors a day cap.

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Why would even a website that has just one article which is some 1000-3000 words even be thin? Its not just the numbers game. There are plenty of other factors too, like the ads that you are promoting, above the fold, ratio of ads to the content, and many more. A website with no ads and yet one single article is not taken as thin.

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 A website with no ads and yet one single article is not taken as thin.

 

What do ads have to do with it? 

 

With or without ads, a site can be filled with content...or no content at all. Most people aren't talking about ad placement when they're asking about whether a site is thin or not. 

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What do ads have to do with it? 

 

With or without ads, a site can be filled with content...or no content at all. Most people aren't talking about ad placement when they're asking about whether a site is thin or not. 

 

Ads do have a lot to do with it. Suppose you have a 500 word article running in your website, and you have plenty of ads all around that article (say 4-5 ad spaces), Google can take it as a thin content. But if the some content is written in a page with less than 3 ad spaces, Google may not take it as thin content.

 

Google does take in the factor of the ads to the content ratio to figure out whether a website is thin or not.

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The same applies to how often you post. If you rarely post and suddenly Google finds 300 new pages on your site they may not trust that you didn't just spam people. It's important to keep a regular pace, both for your users and for search engines. Remember, search engines want to see your site progress naturally and they have a patent that suggests they have built in time factors stopping sites from going straight to the top too quickly.

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That doesn't sound quite right.

 

Why should Google penalize a site just because it suddenly has a lot of content? There's nothing weird about suddenly having a lot of content. A lot of preparation work can be done off-site and the content is published all at once. One such kind of site would be an authority site. The site owner can put together all the relevant information and release it all at once. Another possibility is a site that took over the content of another site. Then, all of a sudden, the new site would be filled to the brim with content.

 

Why should Google consider that bad? Wouldn't the quality of the content be a more logical criteria?

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Victor, it depends how much content you're talking about and the quality of that content. I see some spam sites adding 10,000 page sections and then wondering why the got less traffic afterwards etc. Matt Cutts put out a video on this subject and suggests that 100 quality pages all at once is fine but warns about what I was referring to, here is his video

 

Edited by bigbigfan
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I hadn't seen that video before, so thanks. 

 

I wonder if they actually manually look at it at all. He sort of implies that it triggers a flag and they go to look, but I don't know if that means there's a special bot that does it or if there's a team that checks that sort of irregularity. 

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I seen someone post about the ads in the information earlier. However, I have found that the ads are making an impact lately as my sites which do not use Google adwords and are well established are falling in the rankings. However, the other competition which does use the Google ads on the site is soaring well above mine even though they are only about a week old. 

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